All-Bedouin Tech Company Hints at Shift in Israel

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Rabaa Al-Hawashleh, 24, with her mother, sister and brother at their home in Abu Qreinat, Israel. Ms. Hawashleh provides quality control for software programs at Sadel Tech.CreditCreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times

ABU QREINAT, Israel — A resident of a ramshackle sprawl of shacks and houses in the Negev Desert, Rabaa Al-Hawashleh is an unlikely worker in Israel’s high-tech industry.

Her mother is illiterate, and her father drives a truck. The Bedouin village in which she lives does not have enough electricity at night to power the laptop she brings home from the office; work must stop once the battery runs out. In a conservative society that frowns on female drivers, she said, she does not have a license.

But every workday, Ms. Hawashleh, 24, takes two buses for a 90-minute journey to her job, providing quality control for software programs at Sadel Tech, an all-Bedouin company that offers expertise in Internet and mobile technologies.

Israel, with a population of about eight million, has long been a global leader in high technology. But the country’s Palestinian Arab minority, which makes up about a fifth of the population and includes the Bedouins of the arid south, one of the poorest and most neglected sectors of Israeli society, has been largely left out.

Fortunately for people like Ms. Hawashleh, companies like Sadel and government initiatives aimed at bringing more young Arabs into the technology work force are trying to change that.

“It was a phenomenon in Bedouin society,” said Ibrahim Sana, the chief executive of Sadel, which he set up in 2013 with an Israeli technology investor. “Youths were graduating from college in software engineering and other technological studies, and ended up as gas station attendants or teachers.”

Mr. Sana, 35, now employs a dozen people. He found one of his employees, who had graduated from college with distinction, stocking shelves in a supermarket. Another was working as an apprentice locksmith.

“It is a real change for those looking from outside, and from within, to feel that we are part of this country,” Mr. Sana said. “Israel is a leader in high-tech, and we want a piece of that.”

Hundreds of Arab citizens graduate from colleges every year with qualifications for high-tech work, but few have found jobs in their field. Of about 284,500 technology workers in Israel in 2013, only 1.3 percent were Arab, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Hoping to address the imbalance, the Ministry of Economy introduced a three-year program in 2015 with the goal of placing 1,000 Arab graduates in the high-tech work force. “They can then open doors for their friends,” said Michal Tzuk, the director of employment regulation at the ministry. “We are trying to create an ecosystem.”

Two organizations, ITWorks and Tsofen, won bids to operate the program, which trains and helps place Arab graduates in tech companies. According to the ministry, 225 people have been placed at leading software companies like Amdocs and Check Point, and at the Israeli branch of Intel, the multinational chip maker, since the program was started early last year.

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Rifaa Azbarga, left, and Ms. Hawashleh at the offices of Sadel Tech, which offers expertise in Internet and mobile technologies.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times

Mr. Sana grew up as one of 13 siblings in the Negev Bedouin town of Lakiya. His father, who owned an animal feed store in the southern city of Beersheba, sent him to study at a prestigious Arabic school in northern Israel. He then graduated from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and received a master’s degree at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He worked at Cisco, the American network equipment company, in central Israel and at various start-ups before founding Sadel.

Mr. Sana’s experience is unusual. Many Bedouins have trouble finding such jobs, he said, because they live far from the commercial center of the country, often in villages that the authorities refuse to recognize, without infrastructure; or because recruitment often works through word of mouth and personal contacts that the Bedouins do not have. Then there is basic prejudice, he said, as well as the fact that English is a third language after Arabic and Hebrew for many Arab citizens.

Those problems are particularly acute in the Negev, where tensions have been high in recent years between Bedouins, who number about 200,000, and the Israeli authorities over disputes regarding land ownership. Two years ago, the government shelved a plan to resettle tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens elsewhere in the Negev that had drawn international condemnation and spurred demonstrations across Israel.

Sadel, in an industrial park about five miles from a growing technology center in Beersheba, mixes technology with tradition. At lunchtime, for example, the employees take out their prayer mats and perform Muslim midday prayers.

On a recent afternoon, Bassam Abu Zaed, 27, a web and Android developer and a quality assurance team leader, finished his prayers and was soon back at his desk developing a diagnostics application for mobile devices that he intends to sell to cellphone companies.

Sadel is also unusual in that it hires Bedouin women, whose employment opportunities are usually limited to fields such as education. Rifaa Azbarga, 26, one of three women working at Sadel, received a degree in software engineering and then taught math in the Bedouin town of Keseife “because everyone told me they never take Arabs into high-tech.” She now builds websites for businesses and is developing an Android application that combines radio news, advertising and chat functions.

Ms. Hawashleh, one of 11 siblings, went to school in the village of Abu Qreinat, which has a population of about 5,000. A star pupil, she said she had only herself to compete with and constantly strove to raise her grades.

After a year of studying math and computer science at Ben-Gurion University, Ms. Hawashleh dropped out because she needed to help support her family, and taught in the village school until a friend who worked at Sadel introduced her to the company.

Ms. Hawashleh said that her parents, who were born in Abu Qreinat, want her to marry within the extended family, but that she would prefer to look farther afield and perhaps move to one of the larger Bedouin towns in the area.

“My parents say that they know what’s good for me,” Ms. Hawashleh said with a giggle, sitting on an embroidered mattress next to her mother. “To teach, marry and have a family.”

Despite this, her mother, Hesen, 50, said she and her husband were proud that they had educated their girls and were happy about her career.

Ms. Hawashleh said that when she first began working at Sadel, her parents did not tell relatives, assuming that they would disapprove of her working in a company away from home.

“Now,” she said, “they all know.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: All-Bedouin Tech Company Hints at Shift in Israel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe